In Phoenix, Trump Lets the Real World Go Away

President Trump spoke for seventy-five minutes, giving full voice to the flitting, self-obsessed, self-pitying, and openly deceitful quality that typifies his rhetoric.

Photograph by Rick Scuteri / AP

Some of the most uncontrolled moments in Donald Trump’s rallies come,
for one reason or another, when he, with a piece of paper in hand,
recites his own past statements. That was the case in December, 2015,
when he read aloud his call for a complete and total ban on Muslims
entering the United States, punctuating it with phrases like “What the
hell is going on!” And it was the case at the Phoenix Convention Center
on Tuesday night, in a performance that was, by turns, ranting,
rambling, whining, bitter, and—given that the speaker is the President
of the United States—frightening. Trump read excerpts from various remarks that he had made about the Unite the Right gathering in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the violence that it had sparked. Perhaps reading his own turns of phrase just excites him—“The words are
perfect!” he said at one point in Phoenix, with an expression of dazed
appreciation. Or perhaps it serves him to regard himself in the third
person, as a character for whom he can script any line—and any reality.
(In Phoenix he said, of himself, “I don’t believe that any
President has accomplished as much as this President.”) But recitation
also seems to make it easier for him to summon up hate, particularly
against other people who tell different stories about who Trump is and
what he does.

In Phoenix, the entire arena, he said, was full of individuals who, like
him, were opposed to hatred and violence. “But the very dishonest media,
those people, up there, with all the cameras . . . and I mean truly
dishonest people in the media and the fake media, they make up stories!”
Members of the crowd began to boo and chant “CNN sucks!” Trump, with an air of
satisfaction, stepped away from the lectern to give them time to chant
some more.

“I’m really doing this to show you how damned dishonest these people
are,” he said. He then quoted the second set of remarks he had made about Charlottesville, on the Monday after the weekend of violence, in
which (as the media honestly reported) he clearly, if belatedly,
condemned extremist groups. “They were having a hard time with that one. Because I said everything. I hit them with ‘neo-Nazi,’ I hit them with
everything!” It was striking that, for him, “neo-Nazi” had been reduced
to a convenient instrument of self-justification, rather than a cause
for questioning or concern. He held up the piece of paper that his words
were written on, as further evidence of “hits.” “I got the ‘white
supremacist,’ the ‘neo-Nazi.’ I got them all in there.” He squinted at
his words and said, “Let’s see—yeah—‘K.K.K.’! We got ‘K.K.K.’ ”

He had less to say about his third statement about Charlottesville,
which he made at a press conference last Tuesday, in which he blamed
the counter-protesters for much of the trouble and said that the
neo-Nazi and white-nationalist crowd contained many fine people who just
didn’t want Robert E. Lee’s statue to come down. After a brief riff about how the jobs he was creating would solve America’s racial
problems, Trump returned to attacking the media, which he now portrayed
as a gang of treasonous liars.

“These are really, really dishonest people, and they’re bad people, and
I really think they don’t like our country, I really believe that, and I
don’t believe they’re going to change,” he said. A moment later, he
added, “These are sick people. You know the thing I don’t understand?
You would think that they’d want to make our country great again. And I
honestly believe they don’t. I honestly believe that. If you want to
discover the source of the division in our country, look no further than
the fake news and the crooked media.” Glancing at the back of the hall,
he claimed to see the networks turning off their cameras and their
lights going out, one by one. This was a lie; the rally was still being
broadcast. Indeed, it was such a blatant lie that Trump seemed to be
using it to demand, from his supporters, something more than trust: they
had to be willing to deny what they could see was true, and do it
happily.

Trump spoke for seventy-five minutes, giving full voice to the flitting,
self-obsessed, self-pitying, and openly deceitful qualities that typify his rhetoric. Eventually, he began talking about the state of West
Virginia, which he suggested had turned into one big boomtown since his
election. This led him to a scattershot of semi-sentences, like a
free-association game: beautiful clean coal, West Virginia’s great
governor, party-switching, American leaders, George Washington—and, with
that name, a bell seemed to go off.

“George Washington—please don’t take his statue down! Ple-e-ease.”
“No-o-o!” the crowd roared, apparently accepting Trump’s assertion, in
his Tuesday press conference, that this would somehow be the consequence
of taking down a statue of Lee. It was “sad,” Trump continued. “From
Lincoln to Teddy Roosevelt. I see they want to take Teddy Roosevelt
down, too. They’re trying to figure out why—they don’t know. They’re
trying to take away our culture. They’re trying to take away our
history. And our weak leaders—they do it overnight. These things have
been there for a hundred and fifty years, for a hundred years—you go
back to a university, and it’s gone. Weak, weak people.”

Who are the “they,” opposed to Trump’s “our”? “They” are the media, of
course—“by the way, they are trying to take away our history and our
heritage”—but the group is broader than that. It includes, apparently,
anyone who doesn’t feel sentimental about statues of Robert E. Lee. And
it most definitely includes immigrants, who were a particular target in
the rally in Phoenix. Trump promised to build his wall; he said that he
would be willing to provoke a government shutdown to do it. (If he is
serious, this is a hazardous development; Congress will need to act, and
Trump will need to sign legislation, to prevent a shutdown this fall.)

The crowd cheered again when he asked, “Do the people in this room like
Sheriff Joe?,” meaning Joe Arpaio, the former sheriff of Maricopa
County, Arizona, and an icon of the anti-immigration movement, who is
awaiting sentencing on charges stemming from his defiance of federal
injunctions. There had been reports that Trump might use this appearance
to announce a pardon of Arpaio; he didn’t quite, though he all but
promised to, in terms that seemed designed to make audience members feel as
if they were insiders, or co-conspirators: “I won’t do it tonight,
because I don’t want to cause any controversy. Is that O.K., all right?
But Sheriff Joe can feel good.” Trump added that he was carrying on the
battle against Mexican cartels operating in the United States, which he
portrayed as a foreign occupation by subhumans. “We are liberating
towns!” he shouted. “These are animals.”

Earlier in the speech, after he had finished quoting himself on Charlottesville
statements, Trump handed the sheets of his speech to the audience, as if
they were relics. These people were with him. They weren’t like the
“thugs” outside, or like the members of Congress who were holding him
back. (He took time in the speech to deride Mitch McConnell, the Senate
Majority Leader, and, without mentioning their names, Arizona’s two
Republican senators, John McCain and Jeff Flake, who, in various ways,
had crossed him.) Then he began talking about what it meant to be Trump,
in a riff that captured his gold-painted populism but was also jarringly
disjointed:

You know, I was a good student. I always hear about the élite, you
know the élite. They’re élite? I went to better schools than they
did. I was a better student than they were. I live in a bigger, more
beautiful apartment—and I live in the White House, too. Which is
really great. I think, you know what, I think we’re the élites.

He twirled his thumb, as if to draw the members of the crowd into the
“we” of Trump. It was hard to know whether he saw them clearly, then or
ever; he has not, on a policy level, done much for “hardworking
Americans”—of any race. He had, in the course of the speech, asked if
the audience remembered his campaign rallies, and the way that
protesters were sometimes manhandled there. “Our people are tougher,” he
said. “They’d send in thugs, and our people would protect ourselves.” He
looked at the crowd. “See this room? You’re safe in this room. You’re very
safe. It’s a big room.” It was Trump’s room—his safe space.

Amy Davidson Sorkin, a New Yorker staff writer, is a regular contributor to Comment for the magazine and writes a Web column, in which she covers war, sports, and everything in between.